Pages

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Churches

“Look, Evan, that’s just the way it
is: you can’t be a vegan goth and
wear leather. Anne-Marie will have a spazzfit if you show up in a
dead cow. You do know leather comes from cows, right? I remember our
talk about pigs.…”

“You’re
never letting me live that down, are you?” he muttered. Evan and I
have been off-and-on friends for years. We drifted apart over music,
united later by goth. It’s
probably not meant for that, but movements that can’t move don’t.
I went all dark and red lips,
he was for black and white, face-paint and everything, as much
because he made him look like a starving vampire as because it made
his father twitch and question his son’s sexuality. It
didn’t make my parents give any less of a shit about me. But I
tried.

“I could go for
fake leather,” he snapped as he vaulted the fence to the cemetery.

I
wasn’t near as graceful
over, but landed quiet enough
behind him. Everyone knew the old Hillborough Cemetery had a guard,
but aside from Halloween old
Warren mostly spent his time
cleaning it up during the day and deep into booze at night. Amanda
told me once I was into goth because it helped hide curves; the worst
about about a bitch is when they’re not all wrong. Not that I’d
ever tell her.

“Fake leather is
glorifying the death of animals,” I said, quoting one of the videos
Anne-Marie had brought to class once. A third of the way through the
one about spider chickens, a third of the class had thrown up. By the
halfway point everyone had been asking about sequels and comparing it
to the Saw movies. Not what she’d had in mind. It’s hard to be
revolutionary in a world of assholes.

Evan
pulled out a flashlight, shone it about and began picking his way
toward the old church. It hadn’t seen use in fifteen years, ever
since a storm collapsed half the roof and it was cheaper to build a
new one than fix it. Tradition comes with a price tag, as the local
paper had pointed out. We had
to read it in politics class, probably to put us off of reading a
newspaper ever again.

“The internet.”
He added nothing else. I wondered if it was on usenet but didn’t
push: my friends didn’t know I was any kind of geek and I wasn’t
about to let them.

“Fine.” I
walked up beside him and toward the church. “What happens if it’s
a bad ghost?”

“We lay it to
rest, of course.”

“You brought
stuff for that?”

“You don’t need
stuff, just kindness. You can do that, right?”

“Bite me.”

The church entrance
wasn’t engulfed in weeds, which at least meant someone was keeping
it clean. It was one of the large domed affairs with holes where
stained-glass windows had once been, giving it the appearance of a
large gaping eyes. The kind of place designed to glorify God and make
people seem like shit, but even now it boasted a sturdy padlock and
chains over the front door.

“Check for a back
door,” Evan said as he walked up to it. I bit back a rude word and
wandered behind the building.

I wasn’t afraid,
but I wasn’t about to tell anyone – not even Evan – that the
reason was that the monster in my closest was scarier than some empty
church. I was way too old to believe or be scared by it, but the
memory had never gone away. The back door was locked as well, though
the padlock was less impressive-looking. I gave it a tug, the
shrugged and headed around the side to find a side entrance devoid of
padlock or lock at all.

“Evan?”

Nothing. I wasn’t
about to shout and alert Warren that we were here: drunk or not, he
could still call the cops. I shoved the door open and walked inside,
a little disappointed when it didn’t squeal like a stuck pig like
they did in movies.

Inside the door was
a run-down old kitchen: everything useful and not bolted down had
long ago been salvaged to leave behind old appliances and range
hoods. No animals, which was kind of odd, but there was enough
moonlight through broken windows and the ruins of the roof to make my
way into the church proper.

There was a nun in
the church. A real one, all black and white habit, kneeling down to
pray at the altar: it hadn’t been moved out, partly because a roof
beam had been fallen on it and because people said altars shouldn’t
be moved, that they belonged to the church they were built for. She
was kneeling, silent, in a patch of weak-ass moonlight.

She stood and
turned. She was thin and old, tired-looking and worn out. “What is
a church for if not praying?”

“Waiting for the
service to be over,” I said, matching her tone. I’d never liked
going to church at all: far as I could tell it was all about men
oppressing women and kids and adults using any excuse they could to
justifying being assholes. And it had taken the best excuse for
getting knocked up and given it to Mary: hard to repeat that one.

“Yes. They did
that so often,” she said, and something about her voice gave me
goosebumps. “The power they gave me was never enough for a miracle
that could last and not a one dared truly believe. They might have,
had you not come here. Had you not taken so much from me.”

“What?” I said.

She stepped
forward. I’d never seen a nun move so fast, but she was in front of
me before I could blink, her eyes so kind it was somehow cruel as she
reached out a hand and dropped it. “You don’t know. O, child. I
cannot place this burden on you in good conscience, no matter that
you are my death.”

I took stumbling
steps backward in the direction of get-the-fuck-away. I couldn’t
see any medicaid bracelet but she was clearly a few bricks short of
anything. She didn’t move, and I spun and bolted out back through
the side door before she went crazy-nuts for my eyes or something. I
spun back once outside and –

– there wasn’t
a door. Just a wall. I stepped forward. Hit it. Hit it again. Swore.
Walked to the front of the church pretty much on autopilot.

Evan had the door
open, the padlock open on the ground, his left hand wrapped up in a
bloody bandage. I wanted to ask why he’d brought a bandage, how
he’d cut himself, but nothing would come out.

I don’t know what
he saw in my face, but he pushed the door open quickly and glared
into the church as if daring anyone to be inside. It was empty. No
nun to be seen, just the remains of the altar and broken pews. We
walked forward as he played his flashlight around with a scowl.
“Empty.”

“Yeah.” I
walked past the altar, turned to check the way I’d ran. A kitchen,
but its door connected it to the back. No side door, on easy access
to the altar. No dust. I started, walked back into the main church
and ran my fingers over the floor, pews, even the altar.

“No dust,” I
said. “Shouldn’t churches have dust?”

“Wind,” Evan
said curtly.

I said nothing to
that and walked back outside, thinking about miracles people couldn’t
believe and lies brains tell us until the world seemed sane and
solid. It took time, but I figured a few drinks would help.

I liked finding it out, too. In my head-canon she was a bit of a know-it-all and loses that sense of, well, knowing More once she's drawn into the magician's world; the loss of it has changed her, and probably a lot more than she knows.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”